


L'ombre

by toli-a (togina)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, M/M, Steve Rogers as the Winter Soldier, WWII
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-04
Updated: 2016-07-04
Packaged: 2018-07-24 04:41:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7494171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/toli-a
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Captain America and Sergeant Barnes fell to their deaths, plummeted off a train in the Alps. Howard didn't believe him, of course, but that didn't mean it wasn't true. (Still, there was something to Stark's insanity, something that got Bucky out of bed in the mornings, searching for a ghost.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	L'ombre

**Author's Note:**

> Still attempting to move all tumblr ficlets to AO3. This one was from a prompt for Winter Solider Steve, which isn't the sort of prompt that can be done justice with a tumblr post, but here's what I've got. (And as always, thanks to cabloom the benevolent deity for the beta read.)

Bucky remembered holding Steve’s hand as they fell. Remembered Steve’s fingers curled around his, squeezing tight enough to crush bone, like he could somehow save Bucky while they both plummeted to their deaths in the Alps.

When Bucky finally regained consciousness, days later, Steve was gone. The farmer who had found him said that no one else had been there, that he had been hiking home and heard the wolves, seen the birds circling and assumed that Bucky was a deer bleeding out in the snow. Steve’s body was nowhere to be found. But Bucky still had the bruises on the back of his hand from Steve’s fingers. (He wondered, late at night when the nightmares kept him wide awake, which of them had finally let go.)

He didn’t report back to base. His contract with the US Army had expired in 1943, and with Steve Rogers dead, what was the point in keeping James Buchanan Barnes alive? (Col. Phillips had given the rest of the Commandos paperwork, but he’d slapped Bucky on the shoulder and smirked, something like pity in his eyes when he’d followed Bucky’s gaze to Steve. The colonel had always been a canny son of a bitch.) They won the war, the farmer told him, once spring had come and gone and Bucky could strew flowers across the patch of land that might have been Steve’s grave, and Bucky shrugged.

Shrugging was still awkward, without the weight of his left forearm. He’d landed on it, apparently, shattered the bones on rocks under the snow, and the farmer’s wife had done some nursing in the Great War.

Howard showed up at harvest time, his French painfully bad and his mustache almost as garish as his American accent. He was looking for a man with yellow hair, a strong man. A man too singular to be killed by something as pedestrian as a fall.

Bucky tugged his hat down over his eyes, twisted his body away from Stark’s searching gaze and handled his scythe like he had two good hands and had been cutting hay his whole life.

“You won’t find him,” he told Howard that evening, settling down next to him at the long bench, fingers curled around a pint. The bruises had faded and his crushed bones had healed – when he looked at his hand now, it was like Steve had never been there at all, like he hadn’t tried to catch Bucky in the fall.

“ _Barnes_ ,” Stark hissed, staring at him triumphantly. Stark had never had much respect for the dead. “I knew it was you.”

Bucky shrugged. James Buchanan Barnes had fallen off of a train in the Alps and killed the best man who’d ever lived. Barnes had  _ deserved  _ to die.

“Don’t you see?” Howard rambled, his English jarring and out of place. “If you survived it, he must have. You know –”

Bucky ignored him. Steve Rogers had leaped off a train for Bucky Barnes – if Steve had lived, he would never have left Bucky to bleed out in the snow. Howard could build a human heart from wires and grease, but he would never know what made it beat.

But Howard offered to pay him, to keep searching, and Bucky needed some way to repay the farmer for taking in a cripple and nursing him back to health, and he needed a way out of the valley. If Stark wanted to pay a dead man to find a ghost; well, Bucky didn’t have any better demands on his time.

_ L’ombre _ , Howard called him. A shadow lost without the sun. The darkness at the bottom of a ravine, bleeding out alone in the snow. Bucky wandered through European forests, through North African cities and Arabian deserts and vast, icy stretches of Asia in search of flashing blue eyes, mussed blond hair and a bloody nose, scraped fists and a shy half-smile.

Steve Rogers was dead, of course. Looking didn’t change that. But it didn’t stop Bucky from searching him out every time he closed his eyes.

He didn’t realize that time was passing without him until Howard flew through Berlin a decade later, a little heavier around the middle with lines across his forehead and radiating from the corners of his eyes. (Bucky had known all along that Zola had damned him, in that room, but he hadn’t known that the porcine bastard had damned him to  _ this _ .)

And maybe, if Bucky had survived, maybe,  _ maybe  _ Howard was right. Bucky didn’t believe it, but it got him out of bed in the mornings, eyes boring through the horizon and not down the barrel of his gun.

He found Steve on a mission in 1965, blond hair ruffled but his face too calm, his silver fist a counterpoint to Bucky’s missing limb. “Steve?” he said, his voice faint from disuse, and the ghost spun around to fight him, blood already on its fists.

“Who the hell are you?” Steve Rogers spat, blue eyes flashing, a question Bucky hadn’t bothered to answer since his death in 1945.

Your murderer. Your shadow. Your best friend.

Bucky settled onto the balls of his feet and shrugged, rolling his shoulders and shaking his arm out to prepare for the punch this Steve would certainly throw. “A soldier,” he finally said, because it was clear that this blank-faced stranger was holding Steve Rogers captive, and that Bucky would only get him back by fighting a war. (It wouldn’t be the first war he fought for Steven Rogers, and if he looked past Steve he could still see the pity in Phillips’s eyes.)

(This time, though. This time he wouldn’t lose.)


End file.
